We are living in dystopia, in a world that is dominated by technology and disconnect, alienation, loneliness, and dysfunction.
Steven Wilson
Owning vinyl is like having a beautiful painting hanging in your living room. It's something you can hold, pore over the lyrics, and immerse yourself in the art work.
Ever since I was a kid, I've always been interested in the poetry of melancholy, if you like.
Porcupine Tree is a band, and it's not up to me where the band goes - it's between the manager, our agent, and the band as a whole.
I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance - these are the bands that I actually grew up with, and I always had these things in my taste, too. And I always loved industrial music as well: I listened to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire. And shoegaze bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine.
Pink Floyd, the most successful progressive rock band of all time, have stood the test of time because the emphasis was always on melody and atmosphere.
I've always been the sort of person who likes to look forward and live in the present.
I never wanted us to be an exercise in nostalgia, living in the shadow of other artists.
When it comes to being in a band or going solo, one is collaborative, and one is not. But generally speaking, when going solo, I am the boss. People can contribute ideas, but I am the boss. When collaborating, you make compromises and look for a common ground.
I grew up with vinyl records and remember the pleasure and the kind of buzz that I got from buying a beautiful vinyl record with the sleeve and the lyrics - all that kind of tactile experience that you could get from an old vinyl record.
The definition of an artist, for me, is someone who is quite selfish about their creativity.
If I want to do an orchestral record, if I want to do an acoustic record, if I want to do a death-metal record, if I want to do a jazz record - I can move in whichever direction I want, and no one is going to get upset about that. Except maybe my manager and my record company.
'Routine' was written on piano, and you can hear that. But then you listen to 'Happy Returns,' and you can tell it's definitely been written on guitar, with that singer-songwriter-y strumming quality.
I think there is something about the Internet which gives people almost an opportunity to role play and to create a facade, an image. I see that as quite a dangerous development because I think what we call social networking, Twitter, Facebook, etc., is actually quite antisocial.
I've put out records over the years, whether it's with Blackfield or No-Man or Bass Communion or Porcupine Tree, that are pop records, ambient records, metal records, singer-songwriter records.
The whole notion of an alternative truth is a paradox. How can you have an alternative to truth?
My musical tastes are very diverse. I just never felt like listening to certain kinds of bands. There's too much great stuff out there.
You cannot please everyone, and I think that what's important, ultimately, is to make sure you please yourself. If you start trying to please other people, you'll just go around in circles.
In the mid- to late '70s, there was no one better than ABBA at writing and producing great pop.
Ultimately, I don't think you can be a character who's completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It's probably true of every writer - it's probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter - that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.
It's a cliche that music rises above it all, and it's a cliche for a reason - it's very often true.
I get really frustrated - actually, it almost makes me angry - when I see, sometimes, magazines will publish a musician's playlist. They'll go and they'll ask, I don't know, somebody from Aerosmith or whoever, Coldplay, to list their five favourite albums. And it's always the same stuff!
We live in a world dominated by fear and paranoia.
When I did 'Hand Cannot Erase,' I didn't have a specific singer in mind.
I like artists that tend to be more interested in reinventing themselves, in experimenting.
One of the beauties about going solo was being able to start from scratch and say, 'What do I really want? What kind of band do I really want? What kind of live show do I really want to stage?' Without any of the baggage of being something with history.
I've always wanted to make some kind of music that was universally appreciated.
I myself lived in London for 20 years, and I never knew my next-door neighbors. I never knew what they did. I never knew their names. They didn't know what I did for a living, and they didn't know my name.
Human beings find change very difficult. They find change is something that can be quite an awkward thing to adjust to. It applies to music. It applies to life. It applies to everything.
What I do is I basically make records to please myself first and foremost, and so one of the most important things for me as a musician and a writer and a producer is to feel like there's always a sense of evolution and reinvention with each record.
The city can be the loneliest place of all.
It's something I've recognized in the careers of those people who have been inspiring to me over the years - Neil Young, Kate Bush, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, and Prince. These are all people who constantly redefined themselves, and had to deal with the difficulty of trying to take their audience with them when they did that.
There's always something special playing in your home country in front of your home audience.
I grew up listening to a lot of very smart pop records by artists like Kate Bush, Talk Talk, Peter Gabriel, Prince, Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears, The The.
One thing I have found over years is that if you change direction, the initial reaction tends to be very polarized, but as the music gradually filters through and fans start engaging with it on its own terms rather than comparing it to what went before, the appreciation and acceptance of it increases.
Every time the mainstream media talk about progressive rock, they wheel out a clip of Rick Wakeman in a cape. For me, it's one of the most ambitious forms of music. The problem is that when it doesn't work, you end up with Emerson, Lake and Palmer doing symphonies with 60-piece orchestras and revolving pianos, which I think is ridiculous as well.
When you're in a band, you're all in it together. You're always available. You're always available for the albums; you're always available for the tours. There's no question of that.
There was a time when pop music and rock music were really reaching for the stars and were not ashamed to be experimental. You think of a song like 'Shout' by Tears for Fears. That's a massive global No. 1 hit, and yet the subject matter is very dark.
I've seen a fair amount of concert DVDs - some of them are great, some of them are not. If there are problems with them, it's usually because of budget limitations and camerawork.
It's possible that Israel will be my second home, but it won't be my only home.
People who like progressive music tend to sneer at the idea of a kind of punk aesthetic, and people who like alternative indie rock or punk rock tend to sneer at what they see as the pretentiousness and pomposity of progressive music.
It's one thing to fail with something you utterly believe in, but to fail with something you don't believe in? You just feel so sordid.
We had an extreme reaction to Storm Corrosion. We were proud of it, but it divided the audience. The metal fans were divided. Some went with it. Some hated it, since it wasn't the progressive metal supergroup they were waiting for.
Some musicians feel they have to provide what their audiences expect. They lose the distinction between an artist and an entertainer. I am not an entertainer.
I think there's something very peculiar about living in the city and not part of the major metropolis; that actually makes it remarkably easy to disappear.
There are certain topics that I've come back to time and again throughout my career. On 'To the Bone,' there are certain subjects I have touched on before.
I wanted people to say that our music sounds like Porcupine Tree, not that it sounds like King Crimson.
You will hear ambient in our music. You will hear trip-hop.
Certainly for some time, people used to think of my solo career as somehow a side project to Porcupine Tree. No. If anything, the opposite would now have to be the case.
If you want to be an entertainer, then go be an entertainer and give people what they want. If you want to be an artist, then you have to be true to yourself, and you have to be prepared to confront expectations - and you have to be prepared to disappoint your fans, too.
